The 2024 Berlinale has come to a close, and there’s good news for horror fans – we found five strong films to satisfy every taste for the scary, shocking, or macabre. Look out for each of these, coming your way across 2024…
1. Cuckoo
Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is the giallo-tinged, health-spa-set, hallucinatory monster movie you didn’t know you needed. From the first cuckoo’s call to the last unsettling frame, this film slaps. Hunter Schafer plays the sullen teen who is roped along on a family stay at a remote German health resort, togwther with her father, stepmother and half-sister. Things rapidly get pretty weird, especially thanks to the odd vibes coming from the resort’s owner, played by none other than Dan Stevens.
It’s also camp as hell when it wants to be. If you loved Dan Stevens’s vaguely psychotic performance in The Guest, imagine him doing that but with a German accent, all while insisting that his remote health spa is actually perfectly normal, and that you definitely shouldn’t worry about all the seizures, time-slips, or vomiting… or the feral woman running about in the woods.
It’s queer, it’s deranged, it romps along like an early-80s Argento flick… Cuckoo will keep you on the edge of your seat, never knowing which way it’s going until the very last shot. I adored it.
2. Chime
Your boy Kiyoshi Kurosawa is back on his Cure tip and playing games with horror tropes and audiovisual signifiers. Yes! We stan a steadfast refusal to collapse into a coherent rationality. Destabilise that shit, girl, go off!
The plot, such as it is, involves a culinary workshop teacher whose life starts to come apart when a particularly sullen student complains of a noise only he can seem to hear – a sort of chime. From there Kurosawa steadfastly zigs where others would zag, tears up the rule book, and drags us down into a strange kind of hell. With a short (45 minute) runtime he’s less interested in meeting the audience’s interest in a straightforward narrative, and more in absolutely messing with everyone’s heads. Let him cook!
3. Exhuma
This is hands down the best Korean horror since The Wailing*… In fact it’s a must see for The Wailing fans as it plays in such similar territory: a geomancer, a shaman and a Christian spiritualist race to solve the riddle of a dying baby and its links to a mysterious unmarked family grave.
Featuring the lead actor (Choi Min-sik) from Oldboy, the cinematographer of I Saw The Devil, the stunt coordinator from Thirst, the sound guy from Parasite, and the composer from Bedevilled, the director has quietly amassed quite a team here, and it pays off. Exhuma grabs the audience by the throat and never lets go. The only flaw was the unnecessary use of chapter titles. Please can we consign that affectation to the past? Otherwise this is top-tier K-Horror.
*or, if you prefer, that year’s Last Train To Busan.
4. I Saw The TV Glow
There’s no sophomore slump from Jane Schoenbrun, who delivers an emotional powder keg built from the memories and dreams of late 90s tv – Buffy, Eerie Indiana, Twin Peaks, and The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Teenager Owen is trying to keep his head down and make it through suburban life when an older classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show called The Pink Opaque — where two best friends battle supernatural forces in spiritual plane that exists alongside our own world. But is the impact of the show good or bad?
Starting sweetly but building into a devastating nightmare, I Saw The TV Glow reminded me of Philip K Dick’s convictions that we are living in a false reality… in fact, it’s the best “can we escape the matrix” trans movie since, ah, The Matrix.
5. The Devil’s Bath
Aunt-and-nephew directorial team Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s follow-up Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge is an 18th century, feminist, anti-bucolic tale in which a newlywed wife’s mental health slowly collapses in the face of woodland isolation, a disengaged husband and a terminally overbearing mother-in-law.
Sparse dialogue, natural light and lots of mud make this a must-see for fans of the colours green and brown. There are shades of Von Trier in both the plot (Dogville) and visuals (Anti-Christ). Already a slow-burn, the pacing peters out even further in the third act, but the gut punch of an ending in unforgettable.
Whitlock&Pope 